1) How old is your great-grandfather now, or how old would he be if he had lived? Divide this number by 4 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your “roulette number.”

2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ahnentafel (ancestor name list). Who is that person?

3) Tell us three facts about that person with the “roulette number.”

4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog.

5) If you do not have a person’s name for your “roulette number” then spin the wheel again – pick a grandparent, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!

Here’s mine:

My great grandfather Phillip Podwysocki was born in 1892, so he would be 119 this year. Divided by 4, that is 29.75, rounded to 30.

Number 30 in my ahnentafel is Kalinik Wakulicz, my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandfather. I know next to nothing about him because Ukrainian and Polish records are notoriously hard to get. He would have been born some time before 1875[1], and lived in Rudniki, Poland or Ukraine in 1927[2]. Kalinik had at least three children: Piotr, Jan, and my great-grandmother Oksana.

[1] Piotr was born around 1892. To give the widest reasonable date range, I made the assumption that if Piotr was the oldest son, Kalinik was at least 16.

[2] Oksana arrived in Canada in 1927. On the ship’s record, when asked to give the name and address of her nearest relative in her home country, she gave Kalinik’s name and Rudniki, Poland as the address. Oksana had lived in Swinarzyn, which was in Poland at the time but is now part of the Ukraine.(There are also an overwhelming number of villages in current-day Poland called Rudniki.)